


you looked at me and I was done

by fictionalcandie



Category: Faking It - Jennifer Crusie
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-30
Updated: 2012-05-30
Packaged: 2017-11-06 08:35:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,199
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/416867
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fictionalcandie/pseuds/fictionalcandie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'Inevitable' sounds a lot like 'Nadine'.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you looked at me and I was done

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from Eric Church's _Springsteen_ , which also inspired the fic in the first place.

He’s caught off-guard when sees her again for the first time.

She’s down the street, walking away from him. He can’t see her face and the bouffant on her head is brown, but the sway of her Holly Golightly dress, the bouquet of lilies in her arm spilling over her long black gloves, and the familiar curve of the back of her neck all give her away. She’s so completely, achingly, perfectly herself.

She’s alone.

“Nadine,” he says, without meaning to, and letting it out feels like his first breath in seven years.

She doesn’t hear him, can’t possibly hear him, he doesn’t want her to hear him. He doesn’t know if she’d turn at his voice, if she’d recognize him if she did. He hates the idea of finding out and being disappointed. But he can’t turn away from her. He’s never been able to.

He watches her as she makes her way to the front of the gallery.

There’s music in his head, summer in his lungs, and he’s seventeen again, following her into anything.

The door closes behind her, and suddenly it’s a quiet April morning, and he’s twenty-four and doesn’t follow anyone.

He takes a deep breath, and walks the other way.

* * *

He thinks about it, about her, and how they used to be; can’t help thinking about it.

* * *

“May I?” he said.

Her fingers curled around his arm. She looked up into his face, thoughtful. “You really want to?”

He wanted to like he wanted _her_. Wanted to like he wanted breath and food and the sun in the sky.

“As if you don’t put your name on everything you own,” he said, instead. He grinned. “You’d write your name on the world if you could. You Goodnights.”

“Well.” She smiled. Her fingers tightened. “I guess I don’t mind. If you’re sure.”

He was sure.

He was so sure, he got it done the next day.

Six tiny letters in black ink across the inside of his left arm, her name in his skin, a mark of possession he could take with him, like he couldn’t take her.

* * *

He has family. He has parents, a brother; he loves them and they love him. But they‘re average, they way _he‘s_ always been average. Uninteresting to outsiders.

They aren‘t Goodnights. They aren‘t Dempseys.

He doesn‘t feel average. He doesn‘t like average. He won’t let himself be average anymore.

He hasn‘t spoken directly to her in three months, hasn‘t seen her in as many years.

He doesn‘t _feel_ average.

He keeps his eye out for Nadine. If he sees her again— _when_ he sees her again, he‘ll talk to her, get her attention.

This time, finally, he‘ll get her attention.

* * *

She was in sandals and denim shorts, her hair a sloppy ponytail up high on her head; thrown together in a hasty moment, every artful stroke of her stripped away. She didn’t look like Nadine. She looked like _herself_ for the first time he could remember.

There were traces of tears on her face.

“I don’t want an Oh Baby,” she said, fierce and low. “Not right now.”

“Okay,” he said, giving her what she wanted, always what she wanted. Giving in.

She crossed her arms. “I don’t want my family to know. Don’t tell them.”

“Okay,” he said.

Then, regretfully, because what she wanted could only hold him back for so long from what she needed, he added, “They will find out he cheated on you. Eventually.”

“Of course they will, but _not tonight_ ,” she said.

“Okay,” he said.

“I’m still going to the concert,” she said, tugging her t-shirt straight. “I snuck the tickets out of his jacket while he was pretending he hadn’t hooked up with that waitress.”

He nodded, and, reaching behind him through the open window of his car, pulled a pair of her bug-eye, movie star sunglasses from his glove compartment. He held them out and she took them, pausing with her fingers wrapped around his over cheap plastic.

“There are two tickets,” she said, looking up at him.

“Okay,” he said, and grinned.

The summer air is heavy and thick in his lungs. He’s got stolen concert tickets being pressed into his hand. He’s seventeen.

He’ll follow her into anything.

* * *

“Nadine,” he says, deliberate this time.

She turns immediately, smiling before she’s even facing him. “ _There_ you are. Hello!”

It’s radiant, the force of her smile bent on him. He soaks it up like sunshine. He can’t help himself.

He’s tired of trying to.

“When did you get back in town?” he asks, so she’ll keep looking at him like that.

“Thursday,” she says, and it’s Friday night now. She’s been back for less than two days.

“They didn’t tell me at the gallery that you were coming.”

That makes her laugh, quick and bright, a happy noise that fades back into a self-satisfied, knowing smile. “That’s probably because I didn’t tell them.”

“How long are you staying?”

“As long as it takes.”

He doesn’t understand that, so he does what he’s always done when he hasn’t understood a Goodnight. He nods, and smiles, and keeps going. “So what brings you back? It’s not a holiday, not even for your family, and California to Ohio’s an awfully long trip.”

“I left something important here,” she says, still with the cheshire smile. “I came back for it.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yes, really,” she says.

“What’s so important you’d come all the way back here?”

She puts her hand on his left arm, fingers curling around to the inside, right over his tattoo. She feels warm even through his shirt. Like a brand on his skin to match the one on his heart, the old ink a poor substitute for the real thing but the best he could do.

Her smile softens, slips sideways into something different and terrifying. “You are.”

His heart is beating too hard. Why is it doing that, why can’t he make it _stop_?

“You can’t be serious,” he says.

“Completely,” she says, and he’s known her so long, knows her so well, he knows she means it.

Even now, even after all this time — separate colleges, learning to live for himself, jobs in different states — he still wants to give her everything she needs. Wants to be everything she wants.

“You’ve got my name on you,” she says, gently, and, “I got tired of donuts a long time ago, Ethan. But you _wouldn’t make a move_.”

He kisses her for the first time on the side of the street outside her family’s art gallery, hands in her hair wrecking everything careful about her, mouth on hers moving like they’ve done it a thousand times before.

* * *

Following her was never a bad thing, was never what he minded.

She’d just never led them where he most wanted to go.

* * *

(“You could have just called,” he’ll say, later. “I’d have come.”

“I didn’t have your number,” she’ll reply, her head on his chest, breath tickling his bare skin.

He’ll want to keep her there forever, over his heart, but he’ll decide that another tattoo will be more practical.

It won’t be necessary, anyway.

She won’t be going anywhere without him.)


End file.
